2012.02.26

Today’s Maker Business involved some early morning soldering. (What else would I do at 7am?) Next up is programming, and then I need to drill out all the enclosures. (I’m hoping to do that later in the day.)

Oh, I also built a spray booth this weekend since I’ll be doing a bunch of spray painting. (We also use spray glue in the basement, and this should make that a little less messy.)

2012.02.20

You may or may not know that I’ve run a company for the past 8 years or so, and while our primary business has been related to web development and services, we’re looking at branching out a bit, driven by the fact that more and more I seem be getting requests to help build, or just straight out sell, a button.

There’s a page over on the Sparkbooth site about USB Button Keyboard Replacements that has a number of solutions, and mentions a few of my blog posts, so based on this, I’ll be building a bunch of buttons and putting them up for sale.

I don’t have a ton of experience selling physical products (though I did silk screen shirts and sell those years ago) but I’m going to be jumping into this, and we’ll see where it goes.

I’m not ready to become the next Adafruit Industries or Makerbot, but I’ll be writing up my experiences dabbling in the area of being a “Maker Business” and besides those two companies (which I admire) I’ll be looking at others, and hey look, this piece about Ten Rules for Maker Businesses has some advice for me, so I’ll be using it as a bit of a guide.

Make a profit.

It takes lots of cash to stay in stock.

Buy smart.

Basic business rules still apply.

You get no leeway for being a maker.

Be as open as you can.

Create a community to support and enhance your products.

Design for manufacturability.

Marketing is your job.

Your second most important relationship is with your package carrier.

OK, let’s get started! I won’t tackle all of these in this post, but we’ll start with #1: Make a profit.

Yeah! Money… it’s great! But seriously folks, I’m not in this to make a big pile of money, but I’m also not in this to lose money, or just break even. In my original post about the button I outlined all the parts used, and provided the code. My hope was that others who wanted to make one could, and some have, but there are a bunch people who either just want a final product that “just works” or want someone else to do the “hard work” of soldering and programming. I can handle that…

As for the actual pricing of the product, my initial estimate (before I even read the rule of 2.3x) was pretty darn close. Setting prices can be hard, but I’ve become a firm believer that charging too little is an idea that will do more bad than good in the long run. Yes, some people will think it’s overpriced, but they are more than welcome to buy another product or make their own. I’ve even provided all the info needed for people to make their own. (Yeah, you could mention something about open source hardware here if you’d like.)

So in this whole “experiment” I’ll keep in mind that I need to make a profit. I’ve got no plans to get rich from this endeavor, but if I’m lucky, I’ll provide people with something they want at a reasonable price.

The image above was my first attempt to hack something together. I wanted to do a layout with paper to get a good idea of the physical size of things. As you may notice, the buttons are big, and make the whole thing fairly large. Larger than I wanted. So through a few posts I connected with a fellow maker in Madison who offered me some smaller buttons…

Once I had the smaller buttons, I sat down with some paper and the calipers, and started measuring things, and making the new layout. These were, like the previous attempt, just some rough sketches on paper. Once my paper sketches were done, I moved on to Inkscape, and made the digital version of my control panel.

I then went back to paper, by printing out my files, to get a feel for the size and spacing of everything. I didn’t go as far as mocking up an actual 3D model, though it would have been easy with some foamcore or matte board, but it’s one more step to take if needed.

And as long as I was at the makerspace for some laser-related shenanigans, I figured I’d cut a test of the control panel using acrylic. (I’d like the final done in wood, but I had some scrap clear acrylic on hand, and it’s easier/faster to cut than wood.)

As is often the case, I screwed up one bit of the file, and the lower-left cut is too large. The two holes on the right are waiting for buttons I don’t have yet. Right, make that: buttons I didn’t have yet. More buttons showed up, but they are slightly smaller, so I’ll meed to re-size things again before the next cut. Back to the old drawing application, as they say.

And hey, I better finish this project soon, because there’s talk of adding a 4th and 5th axis to the router! I don’t really mind though, because so far I’ve really enjoyed the process, and I’ve learned a lot along the way, so even if this thing is outdated by the time I finish it, I’ll just start on an upgrade. :)